The music market is quickly evolving and ever-growing. New technologies, opportunities, and challenges are constantly being introduced.
There are many elements that currently employed technology do not address. For example, Pandora Radio manually analyzes its music through employees rather than in an automated fashion. See www.computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/pandora.htm, and www.blogs.sun.com/plamere/entry/genius or savant syndrome. Such manual processing institute a potentially biased view of the characteristics of songs. Also, Pandora Radio is incapable of music back up and streaming music for listeners. Similar to Pandora Radio, Last.fm lacks the capabilities of syncing and music file back-up.
Moreover, though Apple® iTunes' “Genius Bar” promotes the works of artists to listeners, it is not done fairly. Firstly, the analysis of matching artists to listeners is incompetent since it solely relies on simple, incomprehensive data, including genre, album, track title, and artist name, which do not encompass the entire scope of various characteristics of songs. In addition, extremely well-known artists are more predominantly advertised rather than those who are simply a better match. Apple's iTunes also prohibits listeners from syncing music to any mobile device other than Apple's products.
Another insufficient technology, Sugar Sync lacks music intelligence and a platform of artists. Thus, Sugar Sync is incapable of giving listener-users recommendations for new songs and prohibits them from expanding their musical taste. In no way does Sugar Sync introduce the concept of uniting music listeners with artists.
Emerging music artists face multiple obstacles in their attempts to promote their works. Customers have primarily shifted towards using mobile devices to listen to music, and therefore the advertising and retail market for the artist may have a defined channel of commerce for promoting their works. However, this platform-base is overly competitive, and the most popular artists are primarily listened to on these various devices, giving less exposure to novel artists.
The current mobile device technology presents other problems and limitations to the listener such as logistics in storing music libraries and inflexibility among mobile devices to use at any given moment.